James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (22 page)

It’s a house on a corner lot in Clifton, right on the border of Montclair, one of the more upscale suburbs on Bloomfield Avenue. Montclair is where Stephen Colbert and, it sometimes seems, half the editorial staff at
The New York Times
live. So why did it look so “Italian”?

“Well,” Giovanna says, “there’s a fountain in the front yard.…”

Not to mention a big wooden spoon on the wall in the hallway to the kitchen—Giovanna says the big wooden spoon that no one ever uses was a marker of Italianness on
Everybody Loves Raymond.
The crew for
The Sopranos
came and spent two and a half days—they’d originally said it would take two—and Mr. and Mrs. Pugliesi loved it.

First the crew brought handheld heaters to melt all the snow in the front yard (the episode was supposed to be set in the early fall). Then they sanitized the interior of any family possessions that might get them sued later, like photos or awards. They even removed a painting on a wall, in case the artist might object. All these preparations were necessary, and performed at every location the show set up; the location shots are what made
The Sopranos
one of the most expensive TV productions of its time, even though its “exotic locale” was just across the river on suburban avenues and cul-de-sacs.

Then they shot their scene. Stevie Van Zandt, as Tony’s consigliere Silvio Dante, knocks on the door, and Artie Pasquale, playing Burt Gervasi, a Lupertazzi family soldier, lets him in. They talk, and Silvio sneaks up behind Burt and garrotes him in the Pugliesis’ living room. It’s a very violent scene, as graphic as anything in
The Sopranos.
The episode was the second to last of the series, called “The Blue Comet,” because it concludes with Bobby Baccalieri (Steve Schirripa) getting shot to death in a model train store (the Blue Comet was a famous passenger train that used to run between Philadelphia and Atlantic City).

Giovanna says her mom didn’t really mind that it was such a violent scene—“Is no real,” Giovanna laughed, imitating her mom’s voice.

“It was exciting,” she says. “They were shooting this TV show that everybody all across the country was watching, and it was set here, in New Jersey. It was about Italians. What’s not to love?”

The Sopranos
was a show about antiglamor, about this out-of-the-way state that never gets any respect, and it was making all the places it shot look glamorous (at least, in retrospect). James Gandolfini was just a regular New Jersey guy playing a not-so-regular Jersey guy, a murderer, in fact, but that was glamorous, too. James Bond is just a suit with a gun.
The Simpsons
once did an episode about that, how a gun in anybody’s hand, even Marge’s, makes them look stylish, cool, glamorous.

Throughout the run of
The Sopranos,
network executives worried that David Chase’s bleak sense of humor would ruin the whole thing. Early in the first season they knew they had in Tony a character Americans found fascinating, even lovable. Then Chase had him murder that Mafia snitch he’d glimpsed while driving Meadow to visit potential colleges, or had him beat one of his big, genial, but terminally stupid wiseguys unconscious with a phone. How could a television audience continue to love Tony after he did something like that? Archie Bunker would not have survived turning Meathead in for smoking pot in the basement—would folks tune in after their hero had murdered somebody, or terrified them with his uncontrolled viciousness?

They stayed with Tony, of course, in spite of the violence. And that’s largely because of Gandolfini’s remarkable ability to grab your sympathy. But it was also because the audience
The Sopranos
had found was not the same as the audience that watched
Bonanza
or
The Brady Bunch.
For that matter, the United States wasn’t the same country that produced those shows. We weren’t all riding some wagon train to the stars together anymore; there was a lot more sympathy for the devil then there used to be.

The key to Tony’s appeal was explicitly defined in the third season, during an episode called “Employee of the Month,” which dealt with the rape of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco. Her brutal rape was one of those signature
Sopranos
scenes of scarifying violence, the sort you almost never see on TV. Dr. Melfi files a complaint, and the rapist is arrested. But the cops have to let him go because of some technicality, and when Melfi sees him working in a fast-food restaurant, she’s shocked to see his picture framed on the wall as “Employee of the Month.”

Later she meets her own analyst, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg (played by director Peter Bogdanovich), and tells him about the anger and frustration, not to mention simmering fear, that the experience left her. And she goes on to describe a strange dream in which she walks out of her consulting office and tries to get a soda from a vending machine, but it doesn’t come and she gets her arm trapped in the opening. There’s a Rottweiler barking nearby. Suddenly she sees her rapist in the room, he begins to assault her again, and the dog leaps on him as he cries in fear and pain.

“Oh my god, the dog,” she says to her analyst (the script is by Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess). “A Rottweiler, Elliot. Big head, massive shoulders, the direct descendant of the dogs bred by Roman soldiers to guard their camps.”

Bogdanovich murmurs, “I didn’t know that.…”

“Who could I sic on that son of a bitch to tear him to shreds?” she continues. “Let me tell you something, no feeling has ever been so sweet as to see that pig beg and plead and scream for his life. Because the justice system is fucked up, Elliot.… Who’s going to fix it, you, Elliot?”

Of course, no shrink could fix anything in the way her psyche wants revenge—no modern, civilized male could do it for her, either. But Tony Soprano could. He would want to do it for her. All she needs to do is tell him.

It’s an echo of the famous wedding scene in
The Godfather,
when Don Vito Corleone agrees to have the man who beat up the undertaker’s daughter severely beaten himself, in return for a service the Godfather will ask for later. (That service turns out to be fixing up Sonny Corleone’s machine-gunned corpse for burial.) Private justice has always been the mob’s self-justification—they police the crimes the mainstream courts can never adequately address.

This is where gangster movies meet a deep American need to explain the country’s failure to achieve perfect justice. If democracy and civic education are so wonderful, if the Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that perfects the hodgepodge of inherited political traditions brought here from Europe, why is there crime at all? At least, why is there so
much
crime?

All American antiheroes claim vigilantism as an excuse sooner or later—they all want to be the Batman. The Mafia does, too. But they’re not Bruce Wayne. Gangsters have achieved a certain social position at different times in history. When the British annexed Singapore, they decided to exclude the Chinese tongs from the mines, reasoning that they exploited the workers and made their lives miserable. But without the Chinese gangsters, the labor markets became unmanageable. There were strikes, violent struggles between factions, pitched battles in the mines themselves. Quietly, the British invited the Triads and their enforcers back. Gang kingpins took to nice estates in the hills, and had toddies with their British neighbors out of sight of either community.

The Mafia was never that important to American labor, but at the height of unionization after the war, they counted for something. Today, that whole world of unionized labor, big pension funds—pensions themselves—is gone, or disappearing. People loved Tony Soprano because he seemed to be able to do something about all that, maybe turn the clock back a little. Even if it was only to highjack a shipment of flat-screen TVs that would otherwise have gone into shopping centers for the rich. It was nice just to imagine a working-class guy with power.

Dr. Melfi’s moment of Mafia sympathy passes. She tells her analyst, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to break the social compact,” and she never tells Tony about her rapist.

But some of the affection for that “big head, massive shoulders” that she expressed in “Employee of the Month” underwent a kind of psychological transference to James Gandolfini. Because even if he had the bottomless hurt and hair-trigger temper of Stanley Kowalski, deep down you knew he was Mitch. Sweet, dependable,
respectable
Mitch.

*   *   *

New York had a white Christmas in 2010—a
really
white Christmas. After a dusting, a few inches, fell on Christmas Eve, the day after the holiday it started to snow. And snow. The city plows were overwhelmed; Bedford Street in Tribeca went unplowed over the weekend. Monday night around 8:00
P.M.
, a driver tried to use Bedford to make a shortcut onto Christopher Street that turned into spinning wheels in what amounted to a three-foot drift.

Luckily for the driver, right behind him in his four-wheel-drive SUV was Tony Soprano. James Gandolfini climbed out of his car and started rocking the stranded driver’s car back and forth to give him traction. There was so much snow it didn’t help much at first. People along Bedford started gathering to watch—it wasn’t every day you saw a TV and Broadway star looking for cardboard scraps to put under a back tire. A handful of folks started to help. Almost by main force, forty-five minutes later they got the car out of the drift and moving unsteadily down the street. Cheers. Then Gandolfini ducked into the nearby Daddy-O tavern and broke a $100 bill to give $20 tips to all the guys who helped.

Cheers again.

It’s not much, really. Any of us would do the same, especially if our car was behind the stranded driver. James would never have mentioned it.

But the
New York Post
did. And then, so did the TV stations and gossip channels. Sometimes fame is ugly, but sometimes it’s just mindless chatter about everyday events that nonetheless undermine or confirm a larger sense about a celeb. Saving the driver in a Christmas week snowdrift became one of those stories.

No one knew, at this point, about James giving every regular actor on
The Sopranos
a $33,000 personal check in 2004. The OctoberWoman’s Foundation fund-raising for breast cancer research was only dimly perceived, largely because James himself had forbidden journalists and TV outlets from covering it. His work with Wounded Warriors was public, of course, but not that well known in 2010. But the snowdrift on Bedford Street went around the world in an instant.

Actually, James’s friends had noted this public citizen thing of his for a while, sometimes with mild annoyance. T. J. Foderaro recalls going out with his friend for long walks in Manhattan after closing time and dreading the possibility of coming across a wino lying on the sidewalk; Jim might very easily decide that it was going to get cold, or rain that night, and they should stop and help the guy get home, or to a shelter. There went the night’s conversation.

All those years as a bouncer may have had something to do with it. Club managers see all kinds of people in all kinds of states, and their job is to make sure every customer has a good time but can get out the door in one piece. The job itself is about taking responsibility.

Anyway, James was the kind of person you could count on in a pinch like that, and he took it with him to Hollywood, too. Tony Lipin is a film producer in Los Angeles now, but when he first met Gandolfini, on the set of
Crimson Tide
in 1994, he was working as a costumer. He dressed Jim as a Navy lieutenant. Lipin worked with Gandolfini a few times more as a costumer.

In 1997, William Friedkin signed on to do a remake of
Twelve Angry Men
for television featuring Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott, and Lipin was hired to do the costumes. That was a good year for Jim, before his breakthrough on
The Sopranos
but after he felt he had a solid career going as a character actor. He got the part of juror number six, the house painter who tries to get everyone to stay calm and get along.

“I had a chance to see he had a big heart at a cocktail party when we finished shooting
Twelve Angry Men,
a party held really to celebrate a great cast,” Lipin says. In addition to Lemmon, Scott, and Gandolfini, Hume Cronyn, Edward James Olmos, Ossie Davis, Tony Danza, and William Petersen are among the actors. “Bill [Friedkin] wanted us to mark it somehow, so the whole crew gathered for drinks.”

Scott was great in his part, the small businessman who holds out for a guilty verdict because of his personal regret about the loss of his own son (Lee J. Cobb in the original). But these were the years, toward the end of his life, when Scott was pretty lost in his alcoholism.

“The party was winding down, really there were almost no people left, but Scott was totally out of it, lying on a couch,” Lipin recalls. “And it came down to Jim, Petersen, and me to carry Scott out to the town car the production had provided for him. There was no way he could get home on his own. What struck me was the quiet way Jim helped Scott to his feet and got us to take him down and gently lay him in the backseat, no fuss, just simple acceptance.…”

One of Gandolfini’s favorite writers was Charles Bukowski, the Los Angeles poet of the poor, drunks, and the drudgery of taking a straight job. But Jim’s solicitousness for another actor in his cups wasn’t literary. Clearly he understood drunkenness, not just from his time in the clubs but from personal experience (1997 was also the year Gandolfini got arrested for drag racing while drunk).

Part of Gandolfini’s charisma flowed from a romantic fatalism, a kind of hoping against hopelessness. Several of Jim’s Rutgers friends mentioned his affection for a fellow student back then who everyone knew as “John the Arab.” John actually had an Italian surname, but his father worked for an oil company in Saudi Arabia when John was growing up, and when the kid enrolled at Rutgers one of his distinguishing accomplishments was the ability to imitate the muezzin’s chant from a minaret perfectly. At least, perfectly as far as the ears of a bunch of Jersey sophomores in New Brunswick could discern. Hence, John the Arab.